Sunday 9 March 2014

oncall

i have been on call this week and i am on call this weekend. i had not had any calls and i figured i could get away with going to the gym at lunch time as i have not had any out of hours calls all week. as is usually the way, as soon as i got changed and started working out, i got a call from someone who could not get into their system. instead of going home and remote accessing from there, i decided it would be quicker to cycle into the office and fix it from there, which i did. thanks for ruining my afternoon. 

this evening i had to remote in and do a little more work for the north america office, which somehow i got lumbered with. on friday they had a discussion about not wanting to me to work this weekend on it because as a contractor i charge for any extra time i work. damn right i charge for my time.  they asked around amongst themselves and even though they did not want to pay me for today, none of them volunteered to do the work. hey, i am happy to not work on the weekends and you can keep your money, but it turns out none of you (permies), actually wanted to do it, so thats why i said i would because it needs to get done. 

its only an hour of work but the dept head said i should bill it as half a days work. the senior techie who i have to work with and dont much like, said that actually they would pay me a full days money but would also then give me more work to do to fill the whole of saturday, to which i said i was not free for the whole day. i dont think he liked that. hey!, if you one of you volunteered to do it you would not be in this situation but none of you did, so you can not really resent me for being paid a silly amount of money for an hours work, because the dept head agreed to it. pardon me for being helpful and pardon me for being a contractor. if you had the stones you would go contracting yourself but you like giving it large and talking big in a familiar environment.  

were it not for 2 of the guys i work with, i would walk away from this contract at the end of april. one of them got me the job and i dont want to let him down, and the other guy is probably the best contractor in london and i learn tonnes of new shit from him every week. i have been getting lots of calls from agencies despite not applying for anything in months and the market seems to have improved quite a bit. under normal circumstances i would book my ticket for tokyo and end my contract at the end of april. instead i will stay because of those 2 guys who have helped me a lot and to whom i owe a debt of gratitude. 

i watched this recently. watch it if you want to learn something. 

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